(PART FIVE, 2024 Campaign Platform)
The PART ONE essay provided a concept of operations for establishing lasting world peace.
PART TWO provided for a simple fix to the illegal immigration crisis.
PART THREE provided a concept that will fix education and race relations.
PART FOUR defined how to eliminate voter fraud.
There are ten current crises that can and should be part of the 2024 Campaign Platform but the Republican National Committee has not published a Platform since 2016 and has no intention of doing so until at least July of this year. Too late, we needed it yesterday!
PART FIVE, TRANSFORM THE EXECUIVE BRANCH: Make the federal government smaller, more focused, more efficient and more effective. Additionally, the national debt in increasing at several billion dollars per day; this is the first step to institutionalize spending cuts.
GROUND TRUTH
A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable, federal government currently numbering about 4.3 million plus hundreds of thousands of contract employees was never the vision or intent of the Founding Fathers. Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns; cease to be efficient, effective, and/or no longer perform the functions for which they were created. At that point, a large organization will tend to look inward and become self-perpetuating rather than value-added for the greater good.
Some or all of that could apply today to the Departments in the Executive Branch of the federal government. This results in two major problems that desperately need to get fixed.
First, a too-large organization is very expensive to maintain. A more effective and efficient Executive Branch will be much smaller and less expensive. Every 1% reduction in end-strength equals about a $1.5 billion saving in annual salaries plus billions of dollars more in long-term retirement pay and benefits.
Second, and more importantly, the annual U.S. budget boils up out of this massive organization. Every government-funded program is maintained and sustained inside these bureaucracies. These programs are this organization’s product. General Motor’s product is vehicles; the Executive Branch’s product is taxpayer-supported programs. The question is, what is the value added of those programs? An in-depth review will undoubtedly find programs that have existed for decades, their original purpose no longer relevant, programs that sounded good at their inception but have failed in execution, programs to solve a problem that should have been the purview of state or local governments, programs initiated to solve a short-term problem but live on forever. President Reagan summed up the problem with this statement, “Government is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
MAKE EXECUTIVE BRANCH TRANSFORMTION A CRITICAL 2024 CAMPAIGN PLATFORM ISSUE:
The first question is, who should initiate and conduct the Executive Branch review?
Congressional oversight is one of the “implied” powers granted to Congress by the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution. Congressional oversight is a key element of the system of checks and balances of power among the three branches of government. The main goals of Congressional oversight are to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse and protect rights and civil liberties. In this regard, Congress has failed miserably. Someone else has to step up and do this.
Therefore, the next president should fix the Executive Branch and that person should make this reform part of their campaign platform.
Beginning now, and extending through the 2024 general-election campaign, the Republican presidential candidates should make it clear that the priority for his/her vice president will be to lead the restructure process to its conclusion.
November 2024 through January 2025.The president/vice president-elect should concentrate their selection of Cabinet leaders and their deputies who understand organizations, who have successfully led large complex organizations, and who will lead the effort to re-think their mission and to restructure their organization to most effectively and efficiently achieve their mission while also cutting spending.
From inauguration day on through at least the summer of 2025 the Vice president will set up and execute the process. This will be difficult because we are talking about change, massive change, within each Executive Branch. We must recognize that for any large organization, especially one as large as the Executive Branches, change is very difficult. Fear of the unknown is a powerful human force, especially in government with an entrenched, layered bureaucracy that is stiff, stifling, introspective and, in many respects, self-serving.
The newly elected vice president will provide hands-on leadership from start to finish with periodic in-progress reviews provided to the President and we-the-people. This is a long and tedious process; there are no viable shortcuts to re-thinking, re-designing, and re-structuring large organizations and making them be all they can and should be.
FIRST, during the last week in January 2025, the vice president should set up a senior Organization and Spending Task Force consisting of the deputies of all the departments, agencies, and commissions. They will be the change-agents and become the junkyard dogs of the federal government.
SECOND, early February, 2025, define the end state and end date for the campaign. For example, in a formal announcement with the President and the task force members standing alongside, the VP could announce, “Over the next several months, or as long as it takes, our task force will look inside every organizational element of the Executive Branch. We will assess their mission (is it relevant today), their structure (too many or too few people), layering (is it OK or dysfunctional), can the organization integrate vertically and horizontally efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis? Is the organization as a whole agile (able to deal with change as a matter of course) and is there overall value-added for the government and especially for the American people?”
THIRD, immediately begin execution. The process begins in every named organization by putting together a very detailed organization chart. That’s the visual for the task force and it provides an immediate sense of size, complexity, and layering. Big government is layer after layer after layer, some of which produce nothing; they exist just to oversee what is being produced at the layers below. Why the organization chart? Because it allows the task force to begin the analysis and restructure at the bottom of the organization. One cannot reorganize and restructure top-down; to be successful it must be bottom-up.
BOTTOM-UP FROM THE ORGANIZATION CHARTS:
Using the Department of Agriculture as an example, there are 65 different organizational elements that come under the headings of departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices-of, boards and facilities. Inside them are departments, directorates, branches, sections, cells, and individual elements. Every one of those becomes a “box” in the organization chart. Each organizational box must list the name of the element, number of employees, and the grade of the leader, GS 10, 12, whatever.
Within the Department of Agriculture, for example, the Deputy Secretary, part of the VP’s senior task force, will form his/her own internal departmental task force. The Department Task Force’s first action will be to send out an internal memo to the leaders of every “box” to submit, in one week, a no-more-than-two-page report to the Deputy Secretary. The report format should include, as a minimum these six elements:
1.A one or two-sentence mission statement that describes what it is that element collectively does; for example, “responsible for writing, executing, and enforcing Department Regulation 135, Beef Export Program, and reporting results quarterly to ………”
During the following week, the Department Task Force will begin a detailed review of every input report. Their job is to ask, do we need Dept Reg 135 any longer? If so, could this be done with fewer people? Could the same number of employees also be responsible for Dept Reg 246, Pork Export Program? Do we need the report quarterly? And most importantly, what is the value-added of that report and organizational element to the overall Agriculture Department’s mission?
Keep in mind that there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of worthless reports written every year by an entrenched bureaucratic mass that lives on forever sucking up tax dollars, stifling initiative, and being a roadblock to progress.
2.The report should describe the grade structure of all the employees in the box.
The Department task Force will look at the grade structure for each of the boxes in the organization chart. Is it commensurate with the degree of complexity of the mission? Could two or more similar “boxes” be combined, perhaps scaled-down and led by this same leader (a span of control issue)?
3.Describe a typical work week; number of meetings, amount of travel, etc.
This can reveal a lot about an organizational element and its leader. Many meetings are just to fill up time, or are a daily social coffee clutch, or make the person in charge feel like he/she is actually “leading”. Many are a colossal waste of time. If employees have time to attend too many meetings, they probably are not very busy to begin with. Is the travel critical to success, nice to have, or perhaps just to fill up the workweek? Travel is very expensive.
4.What laws and/or regulations guide that organization’s work?
This is a critical element in the review. Has this organization been acting out a scenario that is unnecessary or at least should better reside at the state or local level?
5.Include a list, in single sentences, of major accomplishments in the past twelve months.
The task force will then determine if the accomplishments are in line with the mission or are just doing busy work?
6.Finally, a short statement of value-added. For example, without us the Department would not/could not do the following………
The Departments’ Task Force reviews of the input from the bottom-up is all about policy, practices, process, grade structure commensurate with overall responsibility, span of control, layering, and value-added determination.
There will be tremendous resistance in many, maybe most, departments. There will need to be a heavy hand on the part of the president, VP, department heads and deputies. The President and VP will need to lead by example and downsize the White House staff as well. When the Vice president routinely attends Departmental Task Force sessions, he/she will be grading their work and progress; are they tough enough, too tough, thorough enough, on the right track, or being overly protective of the status quo? The VP will constantly stress to the overall task force that the status quo is unacceptable. The VP will also be able to pick up strong-points and pass them along to other Departments as best practices.
The leaders of the Executive Departments along with their deputies will attend, in mass, a monthly in-progress-review with the president and vice president where they will lay out their findings to date in front of the President and other Cabinet leaders. Invite the media to listen in.
Once the task force has worked its way up from the bottom, looking at every element, their individual mission, and value added, then and only then will they be capable of looking back and seeing how many subordinate elements are off track, irrelevant, unnecessary or even counterproductive. They will then be capable of restructuring, re-aligning, re-tasking, reorganizing the subordinate elements to create an organization that is more focused, aligned, responsive, innovative, agile, and rid of pockets of resistance.
What must be emphasized here is the importance of the bottom-up review process. As the task force works up from layer to layer on the organization chart, they will come to some conclusions about value added at each level. Having reached the top of the organization chart it is possible the Vice president’s senior task force could conclude that an entire department’s continued existence should be questioned. A prime example is the Department of Education. We know that education in America is a national disgrace and not getting better in spite of (or because of) the 4,400 employees and a 2024 budget of $90 billion, a $10.8 billion increase over 2023. Back in Part 3 of this series, Education and Race Relations Reform, a strong case was made for the elimination of the Federal Department of Education.
This process may look tedious and time-consuming because it is. But unless we begin at the bottom and unless we include every element, we will never achieve an acceptable level of success.
CONCLUSIONS:
The task forces must be especially mindful of the phrase, “we provide oversight.”That is a red flashing light that an organization does not, in and of itself, produce anything of value. They simply exist to grade papers, expand their purview, inhibit progress and expend tax dollars. As President Reagan reminded us, “The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
During the process, it is important to not lose sight of the two-fold objectives. First, the objective is NOT to reach some specific lower end-strength number of federal employees. The objective is to rid the government of “boxes” in the organization charts that have no valueadded, they just exist because they have always been there. The end state is an organization that is leaner, more focused, more efficient, more effective, and agile. The second objective is to end up with an organization that has a much smaller and more realistic annual budget.
Why do all of this work? Two reasons:
One the most common attempts at downsizing, in my experience used numerous times over the past decades, have been to declare a hiring freeze or order an across-the-board, for example, ten percent personnel cut, neither of which make any sense nor achieve any lasting positive results.
Second, what I have described above has never been done before. We have just allowed the Executive Branch to grow without ever undertaking a necessary pruning process.
When completed, many positions, perhaps tens of thousands of them, will be eliminated. It will then take a couple years of shuffling the deck by the Office of Personnel Management to get folks reassigned or retired, but it is within the art of the possible and worth the effort.
Let me remind you one more time, the president’s budget is the sum of what all of the departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards, and facilities believe they need to accomplish their mission. When, perhaps tens of thousands of actions, regulations, programs, and policies are eliminated because they are outdated, unnecessary, and/or redundant, the budget requirement can in all probability be downsized by hundreds of billions of dollars.
There is also a states’ rights issues in all of this. As the federal government grows, a natural outcome is that they over-reach into areas that are better and more effectively handled at the local and state levels. Federal over-reach tends to result in a one-size-fits-all approach to problem-solving and creates a stifling regulation-nation.
BOTTOM LINE:
Everyone is talking about cutting spending but no one in recent memory has done anything about it. Making it happen is a 2-step process. This is step one. The second step is coming soon when we talk about how to “fix” Congress.
Getting spending and hence debt under control will resonate with the American people and be a very positive undertaking as opposed to the current tax-and-spend economic baseline of the Democrat Party.
President Reagan got it right when he reminded us that:
“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”
“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”
The Republican Party needs to embrace this concept of operations of transforming the Executive Branch of government as a critical Campaign Platform issue. Embrace it and talk about it.
In the book, FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA, see Chapter 4, TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT, for more details on how to implement this reform concept.
If you know a candidate running for office, please pass this on to them. Thank you.
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, and FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA as well as the author of a blog WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.